Gardening

December 13, 2006 by gbrown

I’m not a gardener, but I spend a lot of my business life growing and nurturing the company. As with the garden there are natural laws that you cant cheat. You always reap what you sow, and as with any garden you have to spend time weeding.

Bamboo
Stephen Covey (in the 7 habits of highly effective people) refers to the Bamboo cane. Growing the cane is not easy. You water and nurture the seed for the first year and no results. Second year, no results. Perhaps it’s dead, a dud seed or you did something wrong? Perhaps you should try another seed or maybe even another plant. After 4 years of watering, the bamboo still shows no results.

In business most people would have given up by this point or worse still buy a ready made plant. On the 5^th year, the bamboo break through and grows 20 meters in one year.

You can’t cheat the natural laws. You can’t create a harvest without first tilling the soil, planting and watering. Likewise, you won’t get rich with the magic pill, the short cut, the “next big thing” or “killer application”.

“My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.” - Jack Welch

Jack Welch was very much a gardener for GE. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers. He earned a reputation for brutal candor in his meetings with executives. During the early 1980s he was dubbed “Neutron Jack” (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. Sounds brutal, but that was his style – a style that added $400m to the value of GE and earned him Time CEO of the century.

The are some free no-effort aspects of gardening – namely sunshine, but everyone has access to that. How you run the business depends on how you perform the very basics – the nurturing and the weeding. The latter is often the hardest and for many people the inability to weed becomes the inability to get ahead. But, accepting this a natural law within business means approaching the challenge with the bigger picture in mind.

“Weeding is as necessary to agriculture as sowing.” (Gandhi)